AI Overviews launched in France

Hey,

Google launched AI Overviews in France last Wednesday. If you don't work the French market, you probably didn't notice, and there's no real reason you should have. France is market one hundred and something. By international standards the story is over before it starts.

That reading is roughly right. It's also why this one is easy to get wrong.

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The asymmetry I watched from both sides

In French SEO circles, the launch produced seven days of noise. Studies, trigger rates, turnkey solutions, people announcing they'd predicted it, people apologising for having written that it would never happen. In English-speaking circles, it's been near silence. A couple of trade posts. Nothing that reached a general marketing feed.

Both reactions make sense locally. But neither helps if you run French pages inside a multi-market estate.

What actually happened

On 22nd July, Google launched AI Overviews and AI Mode in France, two months ahead of the 23rd September ceiling it had given French press publishers in a private letter, and with no signed remuneration agreement in place. France was the last major market without the feature. The block was legal, not technical, and it stopped holding.

The consequence for you is narrow and specific: your French organic numbers are about to move for a reason that has nothing to do with anything your team did this quarter.

The pattern from every studied market holds. Informational and top-of-funnel pages absorb the drop. Transactional, branded and local queries barely shift. Germany, structurally the closest comparison, saw click-through on the top organic result fall from 27% to 11% where an AI Overview appears. That's a split, not a collapse. But a split still lands in a quarterly report as one line going the wrong way.

Don't read the first datasets too closely

Last week, I searched for the altitude of Strasbourg. A single public figure, one line on Wikipedia, the kind of thing a featured snippet has handled cleanly for a decade. I got an AI Overview.

I also tested AI Mode on personal purchases. It kept missing whole parts of what I was asking for. Not wrong, but often beside the point.

The system hasn't found its trigger threshold yet. Anything measured this month measures a feature still settling into place, still rolling out, which is exactly what makes the French studies now circulating so confident and so premature.

The thing worth doing while it settles isn't analysis

It's a baseline.

Pull your French property's pre-22nd-July numbers now, split by query type, before the quarter closes and the comparison window fills with post-launch weeks. Search Console holds sixteen months, so this is still sitting there. It won't be interesting in October, and it won't be recoverable in the form you need.

Because the Q4 conversation is coming, and by default it will be the wrong conversation. Someone will look at a French traffic line that dipped in Q3 and reach for the explanations to hand: content, competitors, a technical regression, the agency. Separating what Google did from what your team did requires a before. Most French sites won't have one, for the same reason almost nobody in France used two years of German data: the thing wasn't here yet, so it wasn't real yet.

France spent two years watching other markets sit the exam with the answers face-up on the table. The exam started last Wednesday. The advantage was never the delay. It was what anyone did with it.

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From my desk

I published a note the morning of the launch: what's confirmed, what isn't, and why the figures in circulation range from −15% to −65% without contradicting each other.

Read the AI Overviews French Launch note

The only response I got to the last issue of this newsletter was one line: "finally, an analysis with an actual action in it." I was pleased, and slightly worried. If that's what's missing, there are a lot of us commenting and not many saying what to do on Monday.

I'm also finishing a full guide on page-level AI Overview exposure. I'll send the link when it's live.

Work with me?

If you have French pages inside a multi-market portfolio and you'd rather walk into Q4 planning with the split already mapped, reply to this email. No scripted discovery call, just a look at where you actually stand.

Have a lovely day,

Alizée Baudez

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 30 July 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

France gets to see the answers first

Hey,

Last week half my feed declared it settled. AI Overviews are coming to France, the deal is done, and a good number of people wanted you to know they'd been ready all along.

So I went back to the sources.

Here's what's actually confirmed. On 29th June, Google notified French press publishers that AI Overviews and AI Mode will launch in France by 23rd September at the latest. That part is real. Much of what came after it is not. There is no signed remuneration agreement with publishers. The APIG (a publishers association) is still asking for one. The 23rd September date is a maximum deadline in a private letter, not an announced launch. And as I write this, nothing is live on google.fr.

"Notified" doesn't mean "settled", and that gap is where people quietly plan against a date that doesn't exist.

But the timing isn't the interesting part. This is.

France doesn't get the version other markets got.

Here's the actual timeline, because it changes how you should read this.

Rough timeline of the deployment of AI Search in Google

Google unveiled the Search Generative Experience in May 2023, a labs experiment, US-only. In May 2024 it became AI Overviews and went live to everyone in the US. Within a fortnight it was telling people to put glue on pizza 🍕 and eat rocks 🪨, and Google throttled it, dropping its frequency to around 9% of queries while it added guardrails. Through late 2024 and 2025 it clawed back, expanded to a hundred-plus countries, reached nine EU markets in March 2025, and kept maturing. By early 2026 it was appearing on roughly 48% of searches.

That's two years of public trial and error. Two years of Google shipping, breaking, pulling back, and rebuilding in full view, which gave every early market a long, visible warning while the thing took shape.

France gets none of that runway. France likely goes from zero to the 2026 build in one step. And the 2026 build is a different animal from the 2024 one. When Ahrefs re-ran their study, the click-through drop on the top organic result had gone from 34.5% to 58% as the feature matured. It's more present, more confident, and better at keeping the click than anything the early markets met at launch.

There's a legal weight to it now too: a German court ruled this year that because AI Overviews produce "independent, new, and substantive statements," Google is the author of them, and liable for what they get wrong. This is a mature system arriving all at once, not an experiment easing in.

So France hasn't been through the same slow adjustment as everyone else, just later. France skipped the adjustment and inherited the outcome.

Here's the part that should change how you feel about it.

If you have a French online presence, the instinct is to read all of this as bad news arriving faster. I'd read it the other way.

France is the only major market that gets to see the answers before sitting the exam. Every English-speaking market flew blind. Germany, which got AI Overviews in March 2025, is now a fully documented case study sitting right next door in a structurally similar market. And what the German data shows is not uniform collapse. It's a split. Informational and top-of-funnel content took the hit, some parenting and health sites down 24% and beyond. Transactional, branded, and local queries barely moved. Booking and Amazon lost almost nothing.

That pattern holds in every market that's been studied. Which means it's not a forecast for France. It's closer to a map. 🗺️

You already know which of your pages are informational and which are transactional. You already have the query mix in Search Console. The work that English-speaking sites had to do reactively, in the dark, mid-drop, you get to do now, calmly, before anything moves. That is a genuine advantage, and it has an expiry date.

The uncomfortable truth under the "we've been ready" chorus is that being aware of AI Overviews and being prepared for them are not the same thing, and the second one is unevenly distributed. Knowing it's coming is not a strategy. Knowing which of your pages are exposed, and doing something about those specifically, is.

I've spent the last year mapping how this rolled out across other markets, precisely to answer the question everyone in France is about to ask at once: what actually happens to my traffic, and what do I do before it does.

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From my desk

A few things I've published since the last issue, if you want to go deeper:

I'm also finishing the Pre-Flight Digital Expatriation Checklist, the practical companion to how I think about entering a new market before the first line of content goes live. I'll share the link with you once it's live.

Work with me?

If any of this maps onto your situation, the most useful next step is usually a conversation. No scripted discovery call, just a look at where you actually stand. Reply to this email if that's useful.

Have a lovely day, 😎

Alizée Baudez

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 9 July 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

What is text, anyway?

The Verge has been asking "what is a photo?" for about a decade. Every time smartphone manufacturers ship a new computational photography feature (every HDR stack, every night mode, every AI-filled sky), the question shifts a little further from what we thought photography was.

After Google I/O 2026, I've been thinking the same about text.

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What Google I/O 2026 showed, more clearly than any previous demo cycle, is text being produced at scale without anyone producing it. AI-written artefacts, generated summaries, prose that answers your query and then disappears, Google Docs Live writing entire documents for you based on a voice note.

Side note: who even uses GDocs for to-do lists? If that's you, please explain why, I'm confused... To me it's probably the most ineffective way to get stuff done. If you're into effective todo lists, check out the end of this email. 👀

These new features prompted a genuine question I haven't been able to shake: what is text, today?

The easy answer is that text has always been two things.

There's text as vehicle: the stuff that carries information from one mind to another, that serves as scaffolding for something else (the presentation, the decision, the meeting).

And there's text as art: the kind that moves people, shifts societies, gets read a hundred years later. The Verge framing applies cleanly here. Computational photography didn't replace portrait photographers. It automated the vehicle and left the art intact.

So the vehicle is getting faster. Fine. Most text was never art. The briefing notes, the website copy, the how-to article nobody reads twice, if AI handles that more efficiently, the world loses nothing it will mourn.

But there's a third category that doesn't fit either, and that's where I keep getting stuck.

Thinking made visible.

Writing is slow. That's not a flaw, it's the mechanism. Your thinking pace is always faster than your writing pace, and that gap is where complexity gets articulated. When you write something out, you find the contradiction in your own argument. You notice that the sentence you were certain about doesn't survive being put into words.

If you keep a journal like I do, you see exactly what I mean.

This process doesn't happen when you speak. It doesn't happen when you think. It happens in the friction between thought and written language.

A lot of what I produce couldn't exist without that friction. Not because the text itself is art, but because the act of writing it is how the thinking got done.

This is what may be quietly at stake. Not the vehicle, not the art. The thinking-writing loop.

If you outsource the writing, do you also outsource the thinking? Not necessarily. You can generate a first draft and engage with it, interrogate it, argue with it, rewrite it until it's yours. Some people work this way well. But the default is faster than that. The default is: generate, review briefly, publish. And in that workflow, the friction disappears. The sentence that wouldn't survive being put into words never gets tested, because it was put into words by something that doesn't have beliefs.

I use AI tools. I'm not making a doomy argument and I'm not going back. But I've become more intentional about when I hand over the keyboard and when I don't. Some things want to be written by me — not because the writing is precious, but because the thinking that comes out of it is.

The practical implication for content strategy is narrower than it sounds. If text-as-information is commoditised, the only defensible work is the kind only you could have produced: the first-hand observation, the specific opinion that comes from specific experience, the case study that finished a strategy. Not as a moral position. As a craft brief.

What is text, anyway? Still a vehicle and an art. And, for now at least, the best way some of us do our thinking.

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From my desk

A few things worth knowing about: I recently put together a resources page where everything lives in one place: products, case studies, and my Claude artifacts gallery if you're curious how I've been building with AI.

Speaking of stuff I vibe coded, let me introduce a silly little app I made yesterday:

The To-Do Bingo: you paste your to-do list in and it turns it into a bingo card, you cross stuff off with a big marker scribble and get confetti when you finish a row 😂 try it on your list for tomorrow

The blog has been active too: my most recent piece is on ten years of not compromising, what I actually believe about international SEO consulting, after a decade of doing it.

If something in this issue connects to a real problem you're working through, I'm available for new projects. The clearest entry point is a conversation or you can browse what a full engagement looks like here.

See you very soon! 🍓

Alizée Baudez

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 11 June 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

AI is in the search box now. Fascinating, a little scary, mostly fascinating.

Hey,

Google is putting AI in the search box. The one that hadn't changed in 25 years.

Think about that for a second.

Google has been testing, iterating, collecting feedback on AI in search for years now. AI Overviews came out, got adjusted. AI Mode appeared, felt a bit separate, then didn't. And at Google I/O last week they blended the two, right into the core search experience. The interface that billions of people have typed into every day since the late nineties. That one.

This isn't "AI is coming." This is Google saying: we've tested this enough, users find it useful enough, and we're committing. That's a meaningful vote of confidence. Not a trial balloon. A structural decision.

And honestly? I find it fascinating to be watching this happen. A little bit terrifying too, I won't lie. But mostly fascinating.

So what actually changed

The way I'd frame it: Google is no longer purely a search engine. It's becoming an action platform. The Gemini agents announced at I/O can call businesses, shop across the internet, build custom little apps in response to a query. The search box now produces artefacts, not just links. Liz Reed, Google's Search lead, put it plainly: they'll send vastly less traffic to publishers, but what does arrive will be higher quality, people who are ready to do something, not just looking around.

The deal that held the web together for twenty years (you make content, Google sends you traffic) is being renegotiated. Not ended dramatically, but quietly repriced.

For most businesses doing good work, honestly? The foundations still hold. Useful content, genuine expertise, real intent to serve your audience. That's not a consolation prize. It's still the only strategy that works across surfaces you can't fully predict. But it does mean that content existing purely as an information delivery mechanism, the kind AI can produce faster than you can type, has a shorter shelf life than it did.

The measurement problem

One consequence of this transformation is that our measurement layer is shifting. Clicks and impressions made sense when search was ten blue links. When search creates its own artefacts, personalises per user, and routes across platforms before a single click happens, what counts as visibility? What's a conversion when the journey starts in ChatGPT, passes through a Reddit thread, and ends on your contact page two weeks later?

The KPIs aren't wrong. They're just incomplete. And rebuilding measurement around what actually serves your customers, real outcomes and real signals, is the unglamorous work that separates the next few years.

The international layer

Personal Intelligence is going live in 200 countries. Two people submitting the same query at the same moment in the same city can get substantially different answers. That's not a glitch — it's the product. And we already know that Google ranking and LLM citation are two independently optimised systems. Being visible in one doesn't guarantee the other. The language someone prompts in rewires which domains get cited entirely.

Nobody is winning the AI search wars yet. I'm not picking a winner. But meeting your customer where they are is no longer a metaphor. It's a technical requirement across platforms, languages, and AI systems that each behave a little differently.

What you can actually do this week

Build the thing that couldn't have been generated: the opinion, the first-hand experience, the specific observation from inside your industry. Get your technical foundations solid. Look hard at what you're measuring and ask whether it still reflects what you actually care about. And if you're operating across markets, make sure your approach is genuinely local rather than just translated.

If you're working through any of this and want a thinking partner, I have availability for new projects in Q3.

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From my desk

(and I've been busy!)

My Lipton Teas & Infusions case study is now live! It takes you through the way multi-market SEO works in practice across a complex international portfolio. → Download the case study here

The International GEO Checklist is still on Gumroad. It's the practical starting point for AI visibility across markets, built international-first. → Buy the International GEO Checklist here

I now offer an SEO Strategy Session format: a brief, a diagnostic, 30-minutes to talk though your next action steps and a written recap within 48 hours. -> Book your Strategy Session here

Last thing: I'm thinking about what to build next for this community. Something focused, worth paying for, useful immediately. If there's a problem you keep running into that you can't find a good answer to, hit reply. I'm genuinely asking.

See you very soon! 🍓

Alizée BAUDEZ

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Work with me

If what I write resonates with where you're navigating right now, the best way forward is a conversation to see whether it makes sense.

Start a conversation→

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 27 May 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

You're in the search results. You're not in the answers.

Hey,

You can rank first in a market and be completely invisible to AI in that same market. Not ranked low, but absent.

That gap is what this issue is about.

Most international sites were built for translation. The local-language version exists because a launch plan said it should. Content was moved across languages, not written for them.

For traditional search, this is survivable. Domain authority and link signals carry a translated page further than it deserves.

For AI search, it breaks.

When a tool like ChatGPT or Claude receives a query in German about your category, it isn't assessing keyword relevance. It's looking for content it can extract: sentences that stand on their own and carry enough specificity to mean something without context. AI tools don't retrieve full pages. They retrieve passages.

Translated content fails this test. No local examples, no local vocabulary, nothing that tells an AI tool: this was written for this audience, not at them.

The distinction worth holding: translated for a market, written for a market, and built for AI visibility in a market are three different things. Most brands have only ever done the first, and most don't realise the other two exist as separate problems.

The consequence: in markets where your content was translated but not locally written, AI tools fill the gap with whoever they're more confident about. Usually a competitor who's been building consistent signals in that language for longer.

The fix isn't an overhaul. Pick the one topic per market you most need to be known for. Get it rewritten from scratch by someone who thinks in that language. The specificity difference is significant. AI citability follows.

I put this full framework into a structured checklist: 24 items across five sections, covering entity signals, content quality, technical setup, local authority, and monitoring. Each item is scored per market in a companion Google Sheet that maps where you actually stand.

The International GEO Checklist — €49, companion audit tracker included.

GET THE CHECKLIST →

From my desk

This newsletter has always been a space for thinking out loud. The International GEO Checklist is the first time I've taken something from my consulting practice and turned it into an actual product — a framework I built over years of auditing international sites.

To be honest, for me it's a bigger step than it looks from the outside. There's more in the works, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

And since you're here, and since you've been part of this long enough to know what I'm about, I'd like to offer you €10 off at checkout with code FIRSTLAUNCH10.

€10 off, valid until 12th May 2026.

Code: FIRSTLAUNCH10

Cheers, 🌸

Alizée BAUDEZ

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Work with me

If what I write resonates with where you're navigating right now, the best way forward is a conversation to see whether it makes sense.

Start a conversation→

---

This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 30 April 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

A decade of not compromising.

Hi,

Today is a strange and good day.

My business turns ten this week. I've been sitting with that number for a few days, trying to figure out what to say about it. And honestly, what keeps coming back isn't a highlight reel.

It held.

Through slow quarters and strong ones. Through Covid, a maternity leave, every algorithm update, and every moment where I genuinely wasn't sure what came next. The consultancy held. And I think that's worth saying out loud, because it didn't happen on a whim.

It started in 2016 with two strangers who needed their CVs rewritten. I registered the business to invoice €150. And somehow, that was the beginning.

After two years, I had a side business generating 15% of my income on evenings and weekends, and a stubborn conviction that I wasn't going back to an office. The maths said it could work. The conviction said it had to.

What followed was a couple of years working from Bologna, Gdańsk, Vilnius, Budapest, the Canary Islands – and more – doing international SEO while actually living it. Then settling Strasbourg, one of the beating hearts of Europe.

Ten years later, I'm still here. Still independent. Still finding this work genuinely interesting.

If you want to read the full story, I've put it together at alizeebaudez.com/10th-anniversary.

READ THE FULL STORY →

I want to say thank you, specifically to you, because you're here. Whether you've been reading since the beginning, found this newsletter recently, worked with me, referred me, or simply stayed curious about what I'm building: it matters more than a standard thank-you covers.

This newsletter exists because I have things worth saying and people worth saying them to. You're one of those people.

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From my desk

I'm heading into the next decade with the clearest sense of direction I've had yet. A lot of what I've been applying with clients for years (the way I think about market entry, content architecture, the decisions that happen before any technical work begins) is taking shape as something more formal. You'll be the first to know when it comes out.

If you know someone who should be reading this, I'd be glad if you passed it on.

Here's to what comes next.

Cheers, 🥂

Alizée BAUDEZ

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Work with me

I work with experienced marketing teams on upstream international SEO strategy : the decisions that happen before tactics.

See how I work →

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 25 March 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

What screen time data says about your website

Hi,

February was an interesting month. Here are three things I've been sitting with:

Let me explain.

The disorientation we stopped noticing 😵‍💫

Open your screen time settings and have a look at what apps and websites you've spent the most time on this past week. Even if, like me, you consider yourself something of an internet adventurer, chances are most of your time has been spent in very familiar territory. That's completely normal. Our brains thrive on routine and pattern recognition; it consumes considerably less energy, and that's a self-preservation mechanism, not a character flaw.

Here's what my breakdown looks like: Instagram, Messages, AI tools, LinkedIn, email, RSS feeds, and inevitably, a very persistent owl teaching me chess. 🦉

If I zoom out, that's essentially two interface structures: message boards and feeds. That's it. Most of us move between those two formats all day.

So what happens when we search for something and land on a website? The first thing our brain does is try to orient itself, locate the information, make sense of the layout. Danny Sullivan framed it well recently, and I'm paraphrasing here: visiting a website for the first time is a bit like stepping out of a train station in an unfamiliar city. A few days later, you can navigate the neighbourhood. But that first moment? Disorienting.

This matters for how we think about content and information architecture. People arrive on our websites from highly structured, formatted environments. A good experience isn't just about design. It's about making sure clarity comes first. Not every website needs to look the same. But the information someone came to find? It needs to be easy to see.

You might be thinking: sure, users first, they're human, let's be kind to those brains. But what about bots? Turns out, as Kevin Indig puts it, AI reads like a busy editor, not a patient student. It skims, it picks up confident and direct language, and it moves on. Content buried halfway down the page, hedged, or over-qualified gets passed over entirely. The pages that get cited are the ones that answer clearly, early, and without apologising for it.

Clarity isn't just good UX. It's the signal both humans and machines are looking for.

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From my desk

February has been about opening up conversations and tinkering.

On the work side: I had a lovely contact this month, sent a solid proposal for what would have been a fits-like-a-glove project: lovely folks, fascinating topic, multilingual website, lots of content to sort through. Unfortunately it won't happen. But I'm having several conversations with partners about developing joined offers this year, and that feels genuinely exciting.

On the making side: if you've been here a while, you'll know I'm a knitter. 🧶 The vest that came off my needles this month is, frankly, gorgeous! (photos and pattern info on demand 😉)

It's perfect timing for the transition into spring, which I can happily report is happening. The big fireball in the sky has been spotted in Strasbourg, finally! 🌞

I've also been doing my share of digital tinkering, testing Claude Code and Cowork, building dashboards and mini apps from all sorts of data. Workouts, newsletters and Brandon Sanderson's bibliography (I know I should read his books, but the sheer quantity is paralysing, so a bookish tracker felt like a reasonable first step). More on that in a future issue, probably.

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Work with me

I have an open slot for a Strategy Sprint in March, a focused week to bring clarity to an SEO situation that feels scattered or stalled. Particularly well-suited if you're navigating multilingual or international complexity. You'll walk away with a prioritised action plan and a clear sense of what's worth doing next. If that sounds useful, I'd love to hear from you. You can book a free assessment call directly.

Enjoy the first rays of sunshine! 😎

Cheers,

Alizée BAUDEZ

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 27 February 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

Fast, slow, and what actually holds

Hi,

January is almost over already. It went by so, so fast.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been in touch with a few different teams, and it really feels like people are moving out of early-year planning mode and into let’s do this mode. Goals are set, processes are in place, 2026 is ready to roll.

At the same time, I’ve heard a lot of unease around all the new shiny, sometimes looks-too-good-to-be-true things we see online. Yes, AI is part of that. But more broadly, it’s about the pace we’re living at. Everything moves fast. Very fast. And it can feel overwhelming.

What I find interesting is the ambivalence this creates between fast and slow: between wanting to move quickly, and knowing (often intuitively) that not everything should be rushed. A couple of things I’ve been paying attention to recently sit right at that intersection.

#1 - Markup hygiene is cool 😎

Let’s start with the boring, unsexy, and yet very important bit: schema markup.

I’ve talked about it before, and the 2025 Web Almanac shows it still holds. Markup keeps showing up as a structurally important layer, especially as AI-driven discovery evolves. Yet, it remains strangely absent from many strategic conversations.

What strikes me isn’t that structured data “works”. It’s that it’s foundational. It doesn’t feel urgent, it doesn’t look impressive, and it rarely comes with instant gratification, which makes it easy to deprioritise.

And yet, the more search and AI systems rely on interpretation, context, and relationships between entities, the more these quiet foundations matter. Not exciting. Just solid.

#2 - Siri is a Gemini ♊️

My favourite timer is getting an upgrade! 😂 I hope… 🤞

Apple and Google entering a years-long partnership, with Gemini powering Siri, feels like a strong strategic signal. It’s not about who has the best AI model, but about where leverage actually sits today.

After years of shaky development, Apple chose integration over reinvention. Alignment over ego (although I’m sure they still have plenty of that!).

AI tools merge, split, tie the knot and move in together like a very well-designed reality TV show. There’s a temptation to constantly try to keep up.

Personally, I choose to invest in solid foundations that work today, and that will still hold tomorrow. Even the biggest players seem to be making that call.

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From my desk

This tension between speed and structure shows up a lot in my work, as it's always been the case in SEO.

Most of the time, I’m brought in when things are changing, and there’s a need to step back, make sense of what actually matters, and decide where depth is worth the effort.

I find that slowing down at the right moments often makes everything else move faster afterwards.

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Work with me

If you’re at a decision point and want an outside strategic perspective before things get expensive to undo, I’m currently open to a few strategic projects.

Have a lovely end to January. 😌

Cheers,

Alizée BAUDEZ

SEO consultant

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 27 January 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.

A simple check-in

Hello, and happy 2026 ✨

It’s been a while since I last wrote to you, so I wanted to start the year with a simple hello.

You may (or may not!) have wondered where I was in 2025. Although it was a quieter year for me in terms of visibility, it was transformative in many ways. I became a mother, my personal context evolved into something very new, and this naturally impacted me professionally.

Behind the scenes, I spent time adjusting and recalibrating how I want to show up in my work. I got clearer about the kind of work I want to do, and how I want to support my clients.

So, in 2026, my focus is on providing structure and clarity at moments of transition.

I step in when businesses are:

In practice, that means helping teams make sense of where they are, what actually matters next, and how to structure their content and visibility accordingly. I do my best work before things get too messy or too expensive to undo.

Search has been my core field for over ten years now (time flies!), and today it naturally extends into AI-driven discovery. I think about both together, as connected systems that need strategy before execution.

If you’re going through a phase of change in 2026 and need clarity, structure, and a strategic outside perspective, I’m open to working together.

You can reply directly to this email to start the conversation.

My availability is fairly open at the moment, and I’m happy to explore projects of different sizes and scopes.

Wishing you a gentle and focused start to 2026 😌

Cheers,

Alizée BAUDEZ

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This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 12 January 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.